I spend some days alone at our place, twelve acres of heat and humidity and chiggers and ticks and a rooster that won’t shut up.  The animals don’t talk so much as scream at a person – feed me, get away from me, look at me, don’t chase me, where have you been all day…

When I wake up I have to clear my throat to get words to come out, words like “hey piggles, you wake up too!”  or “get off the bed you lazy animals”.

I am ignored as the cat just twitches an ear, irritated but with a full belly and another eighteen hours of sleep to look forward to.

It feels like I just wander around on those alone days, tinkering around on slightly neglected projects, working from a list that has no written equivalent.  It isn’t until everyone returns that I realize I have accomplished anything, making me realize that I do have a function even if no one is around to prove it to themselves or to report it to others.  It is simply me moving through the life I have chosen.

It is those alone days that I know concretely that I have chosen well, that all five of us non-human animals have chosen well, that we are some of the luckiest people to ever sign a land title.

Watch out, we are just getting started.

I spend quite a bit of time with our pigs.  Although they are doing work for circleAcres, they could be considered my project.  I move their fence and dumpster their food and make sure their house is in order.  This isn’t to say that the other folks don’t help out with all this, but I am the primary contact with the three piggles.

I pull the lice out of their ears.  That alone makes us pretty tight.

Kristin has become attached to them, giving them their nightly belly scratching and making sure they have enough of everything that they need.  As I alluded to in a previous post, it is because of her view of the way these pigs live that she may be able to eat them when the time comes.  She has been vegan/vegetarian for thirteen years, about half her life, so it is a step that has not been considered lightly or without questions.

I spent some time as a vegan/vegetarian, some five years or so, but as the saying goes, “if you aren’t now then you never were”.  Or maybe that is a straightedge thing.  My reasons for that life were political and human based, focusing largely on the interactions of people in the food system.  Animal rights and treatment were a close secondary consideration but not the major thrust for action.  Living that life greatly informed my decision to eat entirely local and make a conscious decision every time I make a food purchase.

I have eaten meat for the last few years and, with very few exceptions, I know exactly where that meat comes from.  I have to allow some exemptions (such as the weekly free lunch at a church in Pittsboro), but I have to have a pretty good reason and it has to be from a local restaurant or store.

But in a few months, all my pork will have come from a few hundred yards away.

This brings up the issue of how to deal with ending the life of an animal who has shared your space and your time and your close interactions.  I haven’t had to actually address the feelings before simply because this will be the first time I have raised an animal with the intent to eventually kill and eat it.

I can say that the best way to avoid any attachment is to treat the animal simply as a machine, a machine that needs to be checked on once in awhile in order to change the oil or put more fuel in the tank.  This is how many farmers treat everything on their farm – human labor, soil, resources.  Since I am trying to live a new example, I cannot get away with treating non-human farm residents as inferior or not worth any extra effort.  They are not machines; none of the components around me is a machine although sometimes I fail to see that.

I need to know firsthand that I have created a space in which the pigs feel safe, cared for and unstressed and are able to fully enjoy being pigs.  This means mud holes and tall grass, real dirt and kind words.  It means that when it comes down to it there can be some sort of peace between the killer and the killed, that the sadness and harshness of the process of taking lives can be tempered in some way and that life up until the end can be human interpreted as “happy”.

Without trying to justify any action, we, as the users of this food, have to take responsibility for the actions needed to place a meat meal on our plates.  We cannot do that unless we know where our food comes from.

Kristin and I recently returned from a trip to Denver.  I had never been there, so I wasn’t sure what I was looking for in the actual existence of Denver.  I was somewhat disoriented by the city itself;  I couldn’t get my bearings at all in the mass of food deserts and corner liquor stores.

We were there to attend the commitment ceremony of our friend Duncan and his partner Rachel.  The ceremony was fun and short and a good time to catch up with old friends and listen to new friends.  The reception was a potluck with long tables full of all sorts of yummies.  There was even banana pudding, which is my favorite locavore exemption.

In the corner was a whole roasted pig, all wrinkled skin and a nice tan head still attached.  It skeeved Kristin a little.  Her thoughts and imagination turned to the three little pigs we have at the farm and how they would look spread out on a table, some chef’s hands all in their insides pulling out hunks of smoked muscle and fat.  But she says she may eat them when it comes time just because she knows that they have had amazing lives full of good food, tons of space and belly rubs twice a day (more on weekends!).

The reception after-party wasn’t really my thing, which was kind of a bummer.  Since I don’t drink or smoke anymore  I find it increasingly hard to relate to the folks who I consider “my people” – the artists and anarchists and renegade agrarians who wash over me wherever I go – once the sun goes down on a Saturday night.  I can’t keep up or interact.  Maybe I’m getting old or maybe I simply over did things way back when and now I am paying the price for my lack of foresight .  As I keep repeating to myself and others – regardless, here we are…

* The name of this post comes from a song by …Revel in the Morning. They once did a show in the basement of the Local Revolt house in Wilmington. I lived there for quite a while, well from start to finish actually, and our friend Duncan lived there for six months or so. Nathaniel, pictured in many of the slides in the above slide show, lived there for a year. There is a video of a song from the Revel show featuring the actual basement of Local Revolt. It was shot by the band on August 14, 2003 -